I did not find many uses for candy canes on the internets other than some stupid reindeers with pipe cleaners for antlers or sleighs. But I did find a suggestion to heat them up in the oven and try to mold them into different shapes. Sadly, the only thing that turned out to look like anything were the hearts.

I tried to roll up a red and white snail to no avail.

I used a silicone mat and heated up the oven to 325 and waited about 5-7 minutes. The candy canes were malleable and I was able to move them quite a bit. Re-heating ended up making the candy too brittle to work with and it just kind of broke apart.

I refuse to make any candy cane reindeer, but may have to resort to making candy cane brownies or something even duller, like melting a candy cane in my hot chocolate. *Yawn*. That was an actual "recipe" someplace online. "Stir your hot chocolate with the candy cane until the candy cane melts for a delicious treat.". LAME! Another stupid suggestion is to just save them for next year and reuse them. But since I did that last year and the year before this is why I wanted to DO something with them.

But the lamest "recipe" I found online in regards to candy canes has to be this one, courtesy of CTV.

Candy cane air freshener recipe:

In a spray bottle combine 5-10 drops of peppermint essential oil with enough water to fill the bottle. Spray this holiday fragrance in every room of the house.

Snort! What kind of crappy recipe is that? I give that a big BOO!

What do YOU do with your candy canes? Please, tell me!

I promise I won't boo! your suggestions. Not even if you tell me you turn them into air fresheners. Not even if you, God forbid, make reindeers with them. I will be polite. Cross my heart.

After a little shopping trip to Metrotown after work to spend my $50 gift card from Tourism Burnaby, I stopped by our local Chinese food restaurant to bring some dinner home.

I had some tea while I waited for our dinner to be packed up and was reminded that it will be Chinese New Year very soon. I spoke to the owner of the restaurant who told me it starts 3 weeks today - on January 26th. That means it's time to start cleaning up. And one thing that got a little clean up already is my blog banner. Mike changed the picture up top to my 2009 bottle cap shot. Thank you, Mike!

It's the year of the Ox, or as I found from a few websites, the year of the Brown Cow. The heck?

So far none of the explanations of the Year of the Ox are really that appealing to me - they all talk about "nose to the grindstone" and "slow and steady" and being disciplined. Yuck. Due to this fact, I am going to continue my research into the Year of the Brown Cow and get back to you. My friend Catherine has Chinese family members and she'll give me the inside scoop. Also, this year, there will be moon cakes. I'll make a point of getting some this year for Chinese New Year. I think I'd better make a trip down to my favourite shop - TNT - to see if they are going to make Ox shaped cakes, like they did with the pigs that one year. They didn't make rat cakes last year. Bummer. Can you imagine a cow cake? Oh, how glorious that would be!

And in other glorious items, I bought myself some winter boots that remind me of Napoleon Dynamite. Thanks to the gift card I mentioned above, I only had to pay $29 for them.

I bought these bad boys because of the tread on the bottom - much better than the pretty rain boots, I'm afraid. That and I was invited/invited myself to see my friend Jenette go "s"-boarding in the near future, so I must have proper attire up on the mountain.

Tonight at 7:57 pm.

I'll be busting out the rubber boots for work tomorrow. It's definitely looking that way.

Too lazy to change out of my pyjamas I've been wearing for the last, oh, I don't know how many days and too lazy make an actual snowman out of snow, I present you with this little guy.

Would you like to see Skully's hair? I thought so.

Okay. That's it. There is now an official moratorium on any further snow reporting. I mean it. I get it! It's snowing in Vancouver! And it has been since December 22nd. This IS ridiculous.

Moratorium - a waiting period set by an authority. Hey! I'm the authority. I will try not to abuse my power.

Beginning tomorrow at 8:00 am, there will be no more talk of snow or snow-related activities. I will blog about anything BUT the "s" word.

This blog is now an "s"-free zone.

Happy Birthday C@thy! I hope you get another striped shirt for your birthday. Or Lego Batman for the Wii.

Enjoy your crutch-free day [Good news, the ankle is healing up nicely!] and I hope you have some fun, some pizza, and I hear you're going to have some chocolate cupcakes. Excellent choice.

So, Happy Birthday to you! You live in a zoo! You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too!

From your loving sister,

Carol (the one who always stiffs you with the bill.)

Hey, I can't help it that you're the good one with the money, can I?

It's been snowing all day long. My concern at this point is not how I'm going to get to work on Monday. I just have no idea how on earth I'm going to 1) get up at 6:30 am as I have not done that in what seems like three months and 2) is it okay to play Lego Batman at work? I'm feeling confident I can carry the Wii with me to work and there is a TV in the work gym. Since Mike's got every cord known to man in his office, I'm sure I could find a way to hook it up. Yes. Work will be fine on Monday.

I have another question. Do I have to stop eating nothing but cookies? Because I'm pretty sure a cookie a day keeps the doctor away. Thank goodness those cookies arrived, Dianne! They are really good. What are those almond ones? YUM!

In between Lego Batman, I finished knitting the cross-stitch scarf and it's laying on the floor on towels being blocked. It turned out lovely and is 5 feet 6 inches long - about 2 1/4 inches longer than I am tall.

The yarn I used is 50% merino wool, 40% acrylic, and 10% alpaca - very soft and passed my tough, Does It Feel Soft On My Face? test. And yes, it does.

I'll be wearing it to work on Monday. On the bus. *Sigh*

Hey wait a minute, why sigh? I've got at least 40 hours of Wii time left! And I finished a scarf!

We braved the masses today to see if Wii could find ourselves a Wii. Our adventure included driving out to 2 different Costcos, then going to Coquitlam Centre - shown here:

where we looked at Future Shop, London Drugs, Zellers, Sears, and The Bay to no avail. We left the car parked safely in the lot and hiked across the highway to Best Buy where at first, we believed we had hit another dead end. I decided to ask the sales-guy, Luke, when he expected his next shipment of Wiis in and he told me a shipment came in an hour ago and he could get us one. Talk about hitting it lucky! I had heard that Future Shop gets their shipments in on Fridays, so I guess since The Best Buy is the same company, they get their shipments the same day. Either that or it was delayed due to the holidays? In any event, we stood 2nd in line while waiting patiently for Luke to bring out a stack of about 6 Wiis, and the line grew behind us. Sweet. Then we went over to Toys R Us to pick up another controller and some games.

JACKPOT!

Mike's set it up and I'm going to find dinner recipes with very little babysitting is involved. For example, I've got a pork roast in the oven right now...very Wii friendly food as it just cooks for a couple of hours with no attention needed while we play Wii bowling.

Will be back soon. I promise. I just can't let Mike bowl by himself.

Whoa...what day is it? I've been watching movies all day in between editing pictures of Pixie and Mike. Here's one now:

I've been having a very relaxing day, and all I can say is, Wow, Dr. Zhivago, cheating on your wife didn't really work out so well, did it? But that snow house they lived in at the end was BEAUTIFUL.

Here's a close up of Pixie. HE's (yes, he's a he) a rare black Pomeranian. I think he may weigh 5lbs.

Mike wanted to shave him so he'd have a lion mane, but Cathy Mechanic said, "NO" firmly, because she's a good dogsitter.

For some reason Benny doesn't like the camera in the house. I was only able to get one picture of her.

I guess Benny doesn't approve of the Paparazzi - just like Sean Penn.

If it doesn't snow tomorrow, Mike and I have plans to go grocery shopping. I know. We really have high aspirations on our holidays. So much for my ideas about making good use of my time. It looks like it's all TV and grocery shopping city!

I found this cute bottle of mineral water all decked out for the season and took it to Cathy Mechanic's house last night for the festivities. The festivities included Mike, Cathy, Pixie, Benny and myself. It was a small but mighty crew.

More on that soon!

When I'm not flitting around the house in my feather boa and mumu like Mrs. Roper, I use my boa for decoration on the fireplace mantle. I used it this year along with my new nutcracker from work buddy Catherine (he's a cute little stumpy guy) and my new chickadee dee dee painting I bought from Cynthia. She also made that little snowman.

And you know what this picture is? This picture is my 366th picture for this year. I was able to take at least picture a day every day for 2008. Since this year was a leap year, I was able to take 366/365 photos this year. Bonus! One extra day. Phew. And I'm going to do it again for 2009.

I'm looking forward to tonight's festivities and I've been thinking about what I'd like to do in 2009. I feel I need to shake it up a little bit. I'm not sure how just yet, but over the next few days, I'll be writing and sorting that out. And I'm very grateful to have a few more days off before going back to work. I plan on making good use of this time.

Turns out we were not the only ones out after days without a car. So was everyone else. Our first "stop" was actually Costco, but we quickly gave up after not being able to find a parking spot in about 2 minutes. Instead we headed over to Home Depot to find a sign that said, "We are sold out of snow shovels, fire logs and snow melt." Since we went there for fire logs and snow melt, we got back in the car and headed over to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up our Christmas presents from Dianne and Phil. We got there at 1:15 or so, stood in line for only a few minutes and got to the front of the line rather quickly. Mike handed over the slip to the customer service person so she could find our parcel. She came back a few minutes later, told us she couldn't find the package, even though she remembers sending out the parcel slip and asked us if she could just call us when she found it. We went along with her request for a few minutes, but after thinking about it, that did not seem like a reasonable request. We turned around and re-stood in line - this time much longer - presented the slip back to her and asked her to look again. She asked us to please come back at 4:00, where upon I said, "Do you know how long it took us to get out of our driveway? We're not going to come back." So, we stood aside and waited and waited and waited and then she came out of the back room with our package and stated, "I knew it was back there. I remembered writing the package slip." We left the post office at 3:00.

Thank you, Canada Post.

But we now have our cookies and loot from Dianne and Phil! Sweet! Thanks guys!

While Mike was waiting for the search and rescue party to actually read the package with our name on it, I took a picture out in the parking lot and found this poor shopping cart plowed in a great big pile of snow:

Who knows what tomorrow will bring - hopefully more warm weather or rain to melt the snow. Our street is still really full with snow and it's only plowed out for enough room for 1 car to go at a time - just 1 way. But it will be New Years Eve and we've got a party to attend. And we just may be able to get there.

While making some brunch this morning, I looked out the back window and to my delight saw this:

Hey, has someone been reading my blog?

Mike and I watched as this hero plowed out the back lane! Yay!

First stop, grocery shop! W00T!

The Nutcracker by the Moscow Classical Ballet was as lovely as ever. If made to choose, I prefer the short, stiff tutus over the long flowing ones. I was also amazed by the way some of the dancers danced with their backs toward the audience, while wearing a costume that made it look like he or she was facing toward the audience. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on, because I noticed the feet were not looking quite right.

The second half of the dance was my favourite, with the toys dancing with stiff legs and the girls that danced with the big veil. I liked the multi-cultural dancers, too - there was a Spanish couple with beautiful costumes. Dreamy. Also, I do have to give a big thanks to some of the male dancers. Gee, their bums looked terrific. Honestly, it's not many men that can wear skin tight WHITE tights and impress the gals, if you know what I'm saying. I think you know what I'm saying.

I can kind of see why the BC Ballet is still struggling. It could be related to the theatre's current state. It's being renovated, so it's not looking it's best at the moment. There were seats near us that were busted and they really didn't do a good job of cleaning off the sidewalks near and around the theatre today. There was a ton of snow all over while little kids and grannies walked carefully around the piles of snow and around the big sloshy puddles.

Also, no orchestra. Bummer. It was recorded music. And they asked us to please share a program. I guess times are really tough. Even though the theatre was packed (not bad for a 1:30 show on a weekday) they did make a plea to consider donating more money, as they are still $200,000 short to getting the ballerinas back to work again.

Catherine and I talked about going to another show in the near future, so we'll continue to support the local arts that way. I just find it strange that a year before the Olympics are going to happen in our city, we are unable to keep the local ballet company afloat. I know one doesn't really have anything to do with the other, but if we're trying to convince people we are in a world class city, shouldn't our city be able to support the BC Ballet?

And speaking of world class cities...how about that transit system? EW. I took the bus downtown for a good time. I didn't even bother trying to drive in due to lack of snow meltage. I hope my expression communicates my experience ala bus.

Oh, how I miss the car!

My aunt and uncle's kitty, Higgins, is not very social. She doesn't come out much when we're over. And when she does? Yikes.

Now it's off to the ballet. I'm very excited about this. I really wish I could take some pictures, but I think they frown upon the flash during the show.

Looking forward to those Sugar Plum Fairies...

After shovelling the back lane for 2 hours, we called my Aunt Holly AGAIN to tell her we could not get out of the driveway. We tried and tried, but the car could not get up the hill. So again, we cancelled dinner. For 5 minutes. Then Mike suggested we take the EW Skytrain. We called back and told Aunt Holly we'd take the EW public EW transit EW out to Surrey if they could meet us there. I put on my backpack and my rubber boots and Mike and I hiked over to the Holdom bus stop where we started our adventure out to the country. In 2 short hours, we were cozy in Langley, taking pictures of the cat, the tree and the Christmas snowman ball my aunt kept from her childhood days.

I said, "Oh vintage!" and she said, "Yah. Vintage plastic." and rolled her eyes. Hey, just because something's plastic doesn't mean it won't sell on ebay for a small fortune.

They spoiled us with gifts and food and treats. And a ride home. My poor uncle did a lot of driving today.

I'm off to hit the hay for now. I hope you guys are having a good Christmas break, too.

And tomorrow I'm off to see the ballet! Very, very exciting!

This was tonight's dinner. In celebration of the snow stopping I shovelled off the balcony (again) and sparked up the Barbecue.

Hot dogs and burgers. I went all out. And left over veggies from Christmas dinner.

Thank you warmer weather! I can't tell you how happy I am to go out of the house tomorrow in the car. We'll have to replenish our stock of Coke Zero as it's getting dangerously low. And Kleenex due to my cough due to cold. I think we should go to Costco tomorrow! I'm sure Mike will agree to that.

Hallelujah! I think it's back to rain tomorrow. Sweet, heavenly rain.